Robert Louis Jackson considers Dostoevsky's powerful but much neglected Notes from the House of the Dead the seminal work of his post-Siberian period and critical to an interpretation of his art from 1861-1881. He projects this work as an artistic embodiment of a Christian poetics of insight and transfiguration. Breaking new ground, he explores the interrelated social, moral, aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical problems that absorbed Dostoevsky in his prison masterpiece and shows how these same motifs unite and shape many of his subsequent novels and short stories.
Author(s): Robert Louis Jackson
Edition: 1
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 1981
Language: English
Pages: 382
City: Princeton
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. The Triple Vision: “The Peasant Marey“
II. The Narrator in House of Dead
III. The Nethermost Pit and the Outer Darkness: "Akulka's Husband. A Story"
IV. The Problem of Conscience and Suffering in House of the Dead
V. Freedom in the Shadow of the Dead House
VI. Aristotelian Movement and Design in Part Two of Notes from the Underground
VII. Philosophical Pro and Contra in Part One of Crime and Punishment
VIII. Polina and Lady Luck in The Gambler
IX. The Temptation and the Transaction: "A Gentle Creature"
X. The Fourth Window: "A Boy at Christ's Christmas Party"
XI. The Ridiculous Man—Beyond Don Quixote
XII. Some Considerations on "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" and "Bobok," from the Aesthetic Point of View
XIII. The Sentencing of Fyodor Karamazov
XIV. The Wound and the Lamentation: Ivan Karamazov's Rebellion
XV. Dmitry Karamazov and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor
Notes
Index
